The present invention relates to systems and methods for organizing viewing materials and, more particularly, to systems and methods for organizing viewing materials associated with web sites on visual display screens and windows on and within which the viewing materials, e.g., home or web pages, are being viewed.
Currently home or web pages, which are typically accessible over a wide area network (e.g., Internet), are designed without taking into account the variety of displays or windows on and within which they may be observed. Usually, only the most typical size of personal computer (PC) monitors are taken into account by web page designers. If such a web site is accessed from devices with small screens (e.g., palmtops, web phones), only small parts of the web pages can be viewed by users and, in order to access other parts of the web pages, users must move the respective home pages (left-right, down-up) across their displays. The only other options available to users of small screens is to convert the web site completely to a textual context. This is not an acceptable solution for most web site users. Conversely, if a user happens to have a relatively large display screen, the user can see a whole web page which may include several links. However, the user may need to activate several links, hierarchically, before he arrives at the link containing the needed information. The user of the larger display screen would be more satisfied if he could view the content of many links simultaneously, since the size of his display screen can accommodate such viewing. Similar problems occur if a user is viewing web pages in some window, or shell, whose size is only a fraction of a whole screen.
It is to be appreciated that the term "window" used herein is intended to refer to a graphical shell which is typically the outer layer of an applications program which provides the graphical user interface. Since the shell typically includes its own graphical symbols and format, the use of the shell results in only a fraction of the display screen being available to display web page data. Also, "window" may refer to the well-known graphical partitions employed by various software programs running under Microsoft Windows operating systems, which also result in only part of the display screen being available to display web page data.
A Netscape browser provides options for users to strip some specific bars and buttons from a menu, e.g., Jim Minatel, Easy World Wide Web with Netscape, Que Corporation, 1996. However, this frees only small amounts of a display screen or window and does not resolve the problem facing a user of not being able to display many objects associated with a web page.